There are many kinds of booking system in the travel industry or in the entertainment industry, which allow a user to find a specific seat or room by means of a searching system. For example, in the travel industry, if the user wants to book a room in a hotel through a website, the process is as follows. At first, the user has to enter criteria in the required fields on the website in order to launch a first request to obtain a corresponding list of hotels matching the criteria. Thus the booking system displays an exhaustive list of all hotels matching the criteria. These hotels generally have at least one available room. The list of the hotels comprises the name of the hotels and a price per night, which is an indication price. This indication price, also called the “starting from” price, is a specific price dedicated to the online booking engine being used. If the user wants to check if other prices are available outside the particular online booking prices, the user must send a new request to each hotel in the list of hotels to obtain for each hotel the other rates and corresponding services if required. This process is a sequential process which has many drawbacks for the booking system and the user. In fact, this sequential search requires a significant amount of time to display the first list of all matching hotels at a first time. Also, the server at the booking system needs to be able to manage a significant amount of data in order to display the whole list of results or hotels that match the search criteria.
Certain solutions exist in order to limit the amount of displayed hotels in the results list. US 2004/0249684 describes a solution where the booking system always stores availability data sent by the in-house booking system of a specific hotel. Thus when a user makes a request, the results presented show a combination of the hotel chosen and a corresponding available room in the result list. The available room may also have an indication of a specific rate and available services at the hotel. However, there is only one price displayed for each hotel, which is generally the lowest applicable price. Furthermore, as the booking system of a specific hotel only transmits availability data through a polling communication, the user may encounter discrepancies whilst selecting the rate. In fact the rate may no longer be available or the prices may have changed and the user has to re-check the real time availability information for the selected room. Therefore the user may not always have the correct availability information or it may require additional time to obtain this information. The user may also not have all the available rates for each hotel.